My OOPSLA submission (to the Research Paper track) was rejected. Not a big surprise. The paper was ill-conceived, more of a brain-dump of my latest research than a focused story. Still, I thought it contained some real contributions, like a new approach to the problems of mutable state and concurrency.<\/p>\n
I think the moral is that I should be working on demos instead of papers. The ideas in Subtext will succeed only by convincing real programmers that they are worth a disruptive change. I need to show cool features on practical programs. Theoretical papers can come later.<\/p>\n
For the record, here are the reviews:<\/p>\n
\n >>> Summary of the submission < <<\n\nDefines \"inclusions\" as a formalization of copy & paste. Shows how this can do\nthings like functional programming. Then the paper goes on to talk about\nreactive programming, hypotheticals, and IO a bit. Oh, and some concurrency.\n\n >>> Evaluation < <<\n\nThe introduction and semantics of inclusion are a salami-slice contribution;\nyou need to do it at some point these days. The new material that talks about\nreactive programming and hypotheticals and concurrency etc seem to be a\ntack-on, to make the salami-slice paper a little more substantive. I really\ndon't know what to recommend to you wrt this paper. If it were just the\nsemantics, I'd recommend to the committee that it be accepted and given a\ncouple of minutes of presentation to just say, yup, I did a semantics, go read\nabout it. But with the other material included, it seems like the paper would\nbe a grab bag.\n\nWhat is really happening, it seems to me, is that you're putting together a\nlong paper or monograph about this work and packaging it into a series of\nconference papers. It would be better if the paper could be kept to just one\ntopic - semantics, rather than introducing new ideas also.\n\nThe other advice I have is that the presentation of how Subtext works is\ncortex-withering. At least to me. I think you need to work on how to present\nthese ideas. The videos work ok, but still there are mysteries to it as well. I\nsuspect that more detailed, longer explanations of the operations and notation\nand walking through the examples more thoroughly are what's needed. This argues\nthat conference papers are not the right genre (too short) and you need to work\non a monograph instead.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n >>> Summary of the submission < <<\n\nThis paper provides a building block of the Subtext project who was previously\ndescribed at OOPSLA 2005. That is, a formal model (operational semantics)\ncomplete with systematic illustrations of integral trees is provided. The\napproach is also used for the encoding of functional and reactive programming.\nThe emphasis is on formal details that complement previously motivated and\nillustrated facilities of Subtext.\n\n >>> Evaluation < <<\n\nThe paper provides deep insight into the integral tree semantics and its use a\nfoundation of \"programming with copy and paste\". The paper is ingeniously\nwritten and deserves publication, but he level of theoretical study strikes me\nto fit much better with a TCS-like forum (such as MFCS or SAS).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n >>> Summary of the submission < <<\n\nThis paper presents a formalism of the essentials of the Subtext\nvisual programming language, and also describes some advanced features\nof that language.\n\n >>> Evaluation < <<\n\nThe design of the (evolving) subtext programming language has been\npresented in two papers at Onward! over the last couple of\nyears. Those papers were primarily about the design of the language\nand its user interface: this paper seeks to complement them by\npresenting a formalism describing the underlying computational model.\nAs such, it is quite different in both tone and content to the previous\npapers on Subtext, and the formalism presented seems novel.\n\n(Disclaimer: I have not checked the formalism in detail)\n\nI have three concerns with this paper however. The first is about the \npurpose of the formalism. I assume the relationship between the\nformalism and the Subtext system is the same as between say Java and\nFGJ. With textual languages, however, there is generally a good notion\nof why one model captures the important parts of the language for\nsome purpose. The model presented here differs from Subtext in some \nimportant respects: syntax, ordering, constraints, error handling,\nconcurrency - and the paper needs to make clear *why* particular\naspect were included in the model, and which are not. This then means\nit is possible to demonstrate (or at least to argue) that the formal\nmodel in some sense successfully models the language. \n\nFurthermore, a formalism - in this case effectively the\noperational semantics of a subtext subset - is not useful of itself:\nthe point of modelling is to prove some property about a model, and\ntherefore of the whole system. The paper states a number of properties\nabout Subtext and Integral Trees, and although some are discussed I\ncould find no attempt to prove any of them formally - e.g. that\nintegration is confluent; that concurrency is in fact transparent; or\nthat the translation into the lambda calculus is sound. \n\nMy second concern is about the presentation of the paper. While the\nbulk and (most of) the main narrative of the paper is presenting the\nformal model, signifcant asides contain design discussions, advocacy,\nmoral arguments (\"decriminalisation\") or promises about subtext, or\nthe directions within which subtext will evolve. I like these\narguments and think they are worthwhile. In comparison to the rest of\nthe paper, these discussions are generally strictly informal, and so\nfeel very much out of place. \n\nFinally, the paper does not critically situate Subtext into the wider\ncontext of realted work in (visual) programming language formalisms, \nrather than just visual languages themselves: e.g. the point of this\npaper is not (just) to compare with Pictorial Janus, but also with\nJanus itself. How does Subtext related to other languages with similar\nnotions of history, such as Kaleidoscope with its pelucid variables,\nor Liebermann's reversible interpreters? The system also seems to be\nmore than peripherially related to various graph reduction machines\nfor functional language evaluation, for example, but the paper does not\ndiscuss other formal presentations.\n\nGiven these issues, I am concerned that publication of this paper\nwould be premature in its current state. I encourage the author to\nkeep working both on the system and the formal models, and look\nforwards to hearing more about Subtext in future.\n\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My OOPSLA submission (to the Research Paper track) was rejected. Not a big surprise. The paper was ill-conceived, more of a brain-dump of my latest research than a focused story. Still, I thought it contained some real contributions, like a new approach to the problems of mutable state and concurrency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pfEnU-F","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alarmingdevelopment.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alarmingdevelopment.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alarmingdevelopment.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alarmingdevelopment.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alarmingdevelopment.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alarmingdevelopment.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alarmingdevelopment.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alarmingdevelopment.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alarmingdevelopment.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}